Creative Good - High Value Professional Online Community

One of the most valuable online professional communities out there has only 400 members and is barely known by anyone. Recently the VP of Products and Marketing at ZoomInfo told me about Creative Good. The community reminded me of one of my previous posts, An Inefficency of Professional Social Networking.

I was impressed by Creative Good due to the number, and quality of responses to a thread that was forwarded to me. The question posed by a member:

“We are looking for a tool to measure the end-user experience of loading a web page. Can anybody recommend specific tools to accomplish this?”

The thread invoked around 20 high quality responses. At the end the person who posted the question had a list of the top 5 solutions with valuable opinions about their strengths and weaknesses. Even more impressive, is that all the answers came from people who were VP’s or above at major companies. A highly useful community that helps solve real world problems? Absolutely.

In my previous post I pointed out 4 issues of providing a highly valuable professional social network.

One, Quality of the Network. Creative Good has obviously has done a good job with this. Their membership list (I am not able to publish it) consists of around 400 company executives at the VP level or above. Examples of companies represented are Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments, Kraft Foods, Expedia, Shop.com, HBO, NBC, and the list goes on.

Two, Trust. You must be invited to the community by an existing member. Furthermore, members are only allowed to invite 3 people per year, so they better use them wisely.

Three, Critical Mass. 400 sounds like a low number. But critical mass is a relative number. With the high activity of members, 400 was enough to solve the above users question instantly. Not bad.

Four, Focus. While Creative Good’s focus is customer centric businesses and high value professionals, this could actually be an area of improvement. What if the community broke off into sub communities divided by industry? The questions and answers would be much more relevant.

Finally, you are probably asking how a company could ever make money off of a community with such a small membership? Answer, members pay $5000 per year to be part of the community. Not bad in my opinion.

[tags]Social Network, Social Networking, Online Community, Professional Social Networking, Creative Good, Brian Balfour[/tags]